Korach: The Unresolved Relationship

To love and live across the distance..

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Marilyn Robinson's novel Gilead is written as a letter, a dying father writing to his young son, knowing he won't live to see him grow up. It's a book about love across a vast distance. There is a line in the book that resonates when a relationship is painful. The realization that for all our closeness, we are still in many ways unreachable to each other, that we're separated by spaces that, for whatever reason, can't be crossed. Most of us know the particular ache of that distance. There are relationships with a parent, a child, a spouse, where something essential has never been quite understood, where the gap never closed, where we simply learned to live alongside the distance. Parshat Korach is about that distance. Welcome back to Torin 7. I'm Bela Oli Dort. By the time we reach Parshat Korach, you find yourself thinking, wait, again? Haven't we been here before? We tend to think that conflict clarifies that two people who fight their way through a crisis come out closer on the other side. But the Israelites keep returning to the same volatile place. We've followed them through a string of breakdowns in the relationship, but it hasn't brought them to a better understanding of God or of themselves. We discussed some of these in our recent podcasts, the constant complaining that begins as soon as they leave Egypt. They complain about the mana, they cry for meat, they cry for water, they cry against Moshe, they cry against the idea of going to the promised land. They cry sometimes for nothing at all. Each time they provoke God's anger and bring punishment on themselves. And it's the same exhausting pattern: rebellion, divine anger, Moshe falls on his face, he intercedes with God on behalf of the people, he absorbs the friction from both sides until the crisis passes. And then it begins again. This is not a relationship of easy harmony. It's a relationship of constant grinding friction. And it's been like that from the beginning. And then it reaches a breaking point with Korach. The friction finally catches fire. Korach is a man of standing and he uses his status to instigate a populist revolt. He brings 250 leaders with him to confront Moshe and Arun. And he argues that since the entire community is holy, there's no need for hierarchy. There's no need for Moshe to be the leader or Arun to be the high priest. Why, he asks, do you lift yourselves up above the congregation? Korach is simply taking the language of holiness, claiming that everybody's holy, and he uses it as a smokescreen for a power grab and for a way to drive a permanent wedge between the people and Moshe. And then the punishment comes. The earth literally splits apart, it opens its mouth and swallows Korach, his family, and his followers alive, pulling them down into the depths before the ground simply closes over them. It's the most awful punishment in the entire Torah. And after witnessing the earth itself settle the argument, you'd think the people would fall into stunned silence or deep collective reflection. You'd think this would be a turning point in the relationship. But the very next day, the people turn on Moshe and Arun again. They don't offer silence or repentance. They hurl accusation at Moshe. You have killed the people of God, they say. And a plague breaks out. Now Aron has to run with incense into the midst of the congregation, literally standing between the living and the dead, to stop the plague. By then 14,000 people have died. If we expect these ruptures to bring a breakthrough or heal the relationship, they really don't. The story just continues. And this is the pattern that Moshe has lived inside his entire adult life. He's a man who desperately loves both sides and can fully reach neither. He falls on his face for people who are at that moment trying to stone him. He argues for a nation that will the next morning accuse him of murder. And in the end, the man who spent his life bridging the gap dies on the other side of the Jordan, looking into the promised land. It's not a happy ending. But there's a moment earlier in the story that's really illuminating. It's in the book of Exodus in Humashhmot, after the sin of the golden calf, the absolute lowest point in the journey. When God refuses to go forward with the people, instead God says, I will send an angel. I will send an angel before you, but I will not go in your midst. It was kind of a closing of the door, and Moshe couldn't accept it. Raw from the rejection, he makes a request he's never made before, not for the people this time, but for himself. He says, Ha'ini na et khodecha, show me your presence. It's the cry of someone who has given everything to a relationship and is asking the other, let me see your face. But God says, No, you cannot see my face. Instead, God puts Moshe in the cleft of a rock and shields his eyes as he passes by. You cannot see me as I am, God says, but you can see the traces of where I've been. But if we look at the mechanics of how they interact, there is a profound lesson here for any of us. Sometimes the face of the other, their deepest thoughts, their internal landscape, the why behind their silence is simply closed to us. There are relationships like this, the ones where the gap is just there, where you've tried to fully understand the person you love, but they remain just out of reach. In those spaces, all you get is the aftermath. The traces they leave, the fragments from which you try to piece together who they are. Some relationships are never resolved. The gap never fully closes. And if that's true about a connection that's dear to us, that incompleteness is something we have to make our peace with. Because staying in the relationship, even when you're talking past each other, is its own kind of love. That's it for Torah in seven. If you'd like to go deeper, there's a companion study guide with Hebrew terms, sources, and additional readings for further learning at Torah in seven dot substack.com. And if you'd like to dedicate an episode in honor or memory of someone, you can do that there too. Thank you for listening, Shabbat Shalom.